Forget them. The most
influential figure in Australian cinema in the Eight­ies has been Al Batross. Giant, clumsy and bird-shaped, Batross has a fondness for wearing white feathers and
squawk­ing out, in reproachful litany, the names of the best-known Australian
films of the Seventies. His specialty is draping him­self around the neck of
second-genera­tion Aussie New Wavers and making them think, "Anything
past Australian filmmakers could do, we can't do better."

But that second wave
of down-under directors is at last beginning to try. And even succeed. In
recent years, movies like Ann Turner's Celia
and
Jane Campi­on'sSweetie,shown this year in compe­tition
at Cannes and set for the current New York Film Festival, have radically
rewritten the feminist gospel according to My Brilliant Career. And
male direc­tors like John Hillcoat and Richard
Lowenstein have turned Australia's more macho movie traditions (truth at 24
Fos­ters per second) on their sun-bronzed heads. For them the era of George
Mil­ler's Mad Max is over; and Crocodile
Dundee is a bland comedy blockbuster telling us more about world
box-office tastes than about life in Australia today, yesterday or ever.

During the early to
mid-Eighties, all the Antipodes seemed able to throw up on the shore of world
cinema were pale imitations of the First Wave movies: films of golden-Lensed gentility about growing up in the Outback, or
backing out of growing up, or growing back to nature by dropping out. Sylvie,Con­stance,Phar Lap, The Man From Snowy
River, We of the Never Never:the clone factory
seemed unstoppable. There were even directors with clone names, like George
"Not the Mad Max one" Miller.

The only prominent
filmmaker to defy typicality at this time was Paul Cox, and
he hardly seemed Australian at all. In a sense he wasn't. The Dutch-extracted
director's resolutely artistic films
– Man of Flowers, Cactus, Vincent – were more
like film-fest bouquets nur­tured in an acutely personal hothouse than tough
plants rooted in the Austra­lian soil and redolent of its native dreams and
anxieties.

By the early Eighties
most of the original New Wavers had brain-drained to Hollywood. Here they
either flour­ished (Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi,
George "the original" Miller) or flailed about bravely for survival
(Gillian Arm­strong, Bruce Beresford). Meanwhile, Australia's
historical-cultural affinity with America – a shared 'new world' experi­ence
– presented a choice: either to con­trol the fiercer bacterial trends from
U.S. cinema or to create authentically Austra­lian film culture to keep
artistic conta­gion at bay.

For the first time in
over a decade, Australian cinema looks new, combative and exciting. A bunch
of Aussie films have appeared that put discord before decorum,
nuisance-making before nos­talgia. These directors are mostly under 30. And
all dare to introduce Australian cinema – hitherto home of the Golden
Narrative – to shifting perspectives, structural experiment and highly dis­comforting
stories and characters.

Richard Lowenstein laid
the ground plan. A child of the Sixties, he rel­ishes hounding the
Establishment, wherever and in whatever guise it shows itself. His 1983
feature debut was Strikebound,which though it suffered from a holier-than-thou radicalism in its
reenactment of a historical mining dis­pute, occupied ruggedly original
ground somewhere between B-movie and Brecht.

Dogs in Space (1987) is even more
novel. It comes on like a post-hippie musical with a cast too zonked out to
sing or dance. Crusadinglystructureless,
the film chronicles the overlapping des­tinies of a houseful of Melbourne
squat­ters in the Seventies. While Peace and Love yields to the Punk era,
they hold out in their disheveled commune as if it were a counterculture Alamo.

While the music
soundtrack explodes with formative hits, the characters' lives implode with
formative misses. What they can't do or refuse to do – manage their love
lives, get a job, respect the neighbors, honor their parents, be nice to the
police – is as much an affirmation of who they are as what they can do.
Meanwhile, the Skylab satellite rains down junk around them, as if the break­ing
up of outer space were parodying the disintegration of their own inner space.

On the surface Ann
Turner's Celia seems better behaved.
Indeed, it's eerily reminiscent at first of the "old" New Wave, as,
with photo-album wistfulness, it jaunts through a remembered past (postwar
Australia) in company with a little girl growing up. But this little girl is
not a test-tube feminist (My
Brilliant Career),or a victim of the education system (The Getting of Wisdom),or
a pretty young thing steered toward the treadmill of job-getting (Caddie). She's a
paranoid schizophrenic.

Growing up in
late-Fifties Mel­bourne, she adores her Marxist granny, whose room she
venerates and tres­passes even after Gran's death.
She's annoyed when forbidden to play with the neighbor kids, just because
their mum and dad have Communist lean­ings. And she's mad as hell when pet
rabbit Murgatroyd has to be surrendered – along
with all other privately owned bunnies – to the government's "rabbit
master" during the myxomatosis scare of 1957.
"Rabbits are a serious menace to Australia's economy;' booms a
movie-theater newsreel over shots of the furry disease-spreaders taking over
the landmass.

So far, so sane. Celia sounds like any normal kid. But Turner keeps
tweaking the perspective and punching dents in the movie's naturalism. Soon
we wonder if Celia's grasp on reality is any more secure than our own. She
has nightmare visions (in broad daylight) of a slimy, monster hand at the
bedroom window. She likes to press a glass tumbler to her bedroom wall to
hear Mum and Dad making love. With her pals, she impales voodoo images of least
favorite grown­ups. When she plays in the woods, they take on a sinister,
heavy-breathing life. And finally, in a moment of brisk, affect­less
panic, she murders someone.

Celia is the identikit
Australian
com­ing-of-age movie parodied and dismem­bered. Even its faux-innocent vein
of social history – the myxomatosis alert – takes
on meaning as a prankish fable of anti-Communist persecution. And the film's
heroine is not so much a three as four-dimensional character. Not tied to any
one space or time, this riveting little refusenik
belongs to a radical contin­uum. She's an Alice in Oz, riding the surf of
subversion. Celia, one feels, could pop
up in any generation wreaking near-identical havoc.

This bid to uproot
their country's cinema from the parochialism of nostalgia is the best and
bravest thing the new filmmakers have done. Austra­lian cinema got its
national history off its chest under Weir, Schepisi,
Armstrong and Co.. The only significant
exception to the slew of films about the past was films about a garish, gaga
post-apocalyp­tic future. If nothing else, the Mad Max series
attacked the unspoken rationale for staying in Australia: at least
we'll survive World War III. It was, more pro­saically, the primal yell
of the one guest at the meal who couldn't take any more good manners of
"Pass the port:' Max was vivid, commercial,
brutal and defi­nitely not "one of us."

The new Australian
filmmakers are now trying to retrieve that primal yell from profit-making purdah and put it into the artistic mainstream. The two
boldest bids to do so thus far are John Hillcoat'sGhosts
of the Civil Dead and Jane Campion'sSweetie.

These two films
broaden the hint of a multi-perspective style in Dogs in Space and Celia into an all-encompassing strat­egy.
This kaleidoscopism is boldly upfront in Ghosts
of the Civil Dead. Where Dogs in Space offered multiple viewpoints
through which we see the story – and where Celia shifts with teas­ing ambiguity between
an objective, outside point-of-view and an inside, sub­jective one – Ghosts
refracts its jail drama through a maximum-security prism.

"We are the
future in containment;' chants the Disneyland-robotic voice as we're shown
into the New Generation desert penitentiary. Here scenes are fractured and
non-sequential, color can suddenly modulate into surveillance-screen
black-and-white, sound and image seldom match, and none of the cast of
characters comes forward to claim the role of hero or protagonist.

The ghostliness
factored into the film by its title is evident in the movie's sense of a
community where a trance-like pre­determination governs all, even violent or
"spontaneous" events. Just as the riot that leads to the climactic lockdown is
provoked by the authorities, so are the powers-that-be tyrannized by machines
and routines, surveillance and counter-surveillance.

In Hillcoat'sGhosts,no
white knight, no Alcatraz Eastwood, stands up
for truth, justice and the Australian way. Even worse, no figure singles
himself out as a villain, a walking voodoo doll in whom we can stick our
mental pins. Everything, from the characters to the camerawork to the chimera
of moral cer­titude, is a moving target.

Jane Campion'sSweetie,the story of two deeply weird sisters, synthesizes
the best features of all these new Austra­lian movies. It blends the
dissenting punk affectlessness of Dogs in Space with
the caged frustrations and night­mare predeterminism
of Ghosts of the Civil Dead. ("Some animals won't mate in
captivity," boyfriend Lou comments ruefully on his relationship with
Sweet­ie's sister, Kay.) And Campion's picture of
the female psyche adrift in an Austra­lia still stubbornly obsessed with
machismo and male-order family values has the surreal inflections of Celia – andthen some.

What My Brilliant
Career was to the First Wave in new Australian cinema, Sweetie may
be to the Second. Gillian Armstrong's film was made in the gilded dawn of the
feminist movement. Judy Davis – tough, spunky, ruggedly attrac­tive – was the
New Woman, time-warped into the Aussie cinema's then all-purpose golden age
(circa 1900). In Sweetie,the
two sibling heroines, meek and phobic Kay (who's frightened of trees) and
deranged and extroverted Dawn (alias Sweetie), are post-femi­nists, or
what-price-women's-libbers. Feminism may have taught these two women the
virtues of an independent mind, but when your mind is coming apart at the
seams, who cares about independence? Feminism may have taught them to fight,
but they've lost touch with whom or what they're sup­posed to be fighting. So
they fight them­selves and each other.

Shot with Diane Arbus close-ups and a crazed color palette, Sweetie isthe First Wave turned on
its head: it's Hang­ing at Picnic Rock or The Losing If We Ever Had
It of Wisdom. Every time the movie looks set to give us an interlude from
the comic mayhem of home life with Kay, Lou and live-in Sweetie, it bounces
us into an anarchy even fiercer. When Kay, Lou and Kay's dad decide to have a
holiday from the uncongenial Sweetie by going on a weekend drive into the
Outback to see mum, who has put that great Australian utility that is the
equal of gas, electricity and water – namely, space – between her and the
family, the film's bred-in-the-bone bizarreness is fully revealed. They find
Mum living and working in a sort of shantytown for jackaroos
(Australian cowboys), where she's the resident cook and chanteuse. The jackaroos dance with each other by moonlight in the main
street while Mum croons.

Nothing so
inspirationally dotty has been seen since Blazing Saddles,and Sweetie does it
all with a straight face. And keeps it straight for the finale. Returning
home, Kay and company find that Sweetie, furious at their desertion, has
decided to turn into a dog. She barks at them in the kitchen. Then she takes
off her clothes, paints her body black, climbs a tree and bays blue mur­der
across the neighborhood.

Reportedly loathed and
loved in equal measure at Cannes (and cold-shouldered by a jury under the
sober presidency of WimWenders), Sweetie may be the crowning achievement of the new
Australian modernism. It rejects the moral omniscience of My Brilliant
Career:we
are not being guided toward any discernible evolutionary message about
humanity. And it hurls out the window the radiant aesthetic proprieties of Picnic
at Hanging Rock. Campion's style is one of
witty disruption: sudden overhead shots, bulging close-ups, char­acters
bunched asymmetrically on one side of the screen.

Above all, it parodies
and subverts the classical time-sense of the Weir-Armstrong-Schepisi movies. With Cam­pion
– whose earlier short films, like Peel (1982) and A Girl's Own
Story (1984), were five-finger exercises for the surreal sonata of Sweetie
– amovie has not
so much a beginning, middle and end as a life-and-death struggle with the
whole concept of time. Inserted into Sweetie's early scenes are
black-and-white time-lapse shots of plants pushing through the earth. As well
as dramatiz­ing Kay's phobia about trees, these sug­gest the awful
uncontrollability of the processes of growing – whether animal, vegetable or
human. "Coming of age," which in the First New Wave movies was a
synonym for moral victory and self-fulfillment, is in Sweetie a
concept either unrealizable or full of nightmare terrors.

Directors Lowenstein,
Turner, Hillcoat and Campion
are a col­lective reaction against the cloying humanism of Seventies
Australian cin­ema. Weir, Armstrong, Schepisi and Beresford mediated
their dissidence through an (often facile) optimism about the end results of
human courage and struggle. These qualities would always win through, the
films suggested – if not with an immediate, personal victory, then by their
example for future genera­tions. Indeed, most of the best-known First Wave
films were based on books, memoirs or true-life stories that had already
established such heartening immortality.

The new Australian
movies are less dependent on the crutch of adaptation and far more
venturesome and gymnas­tic in marrying dissident themes to dissi­dent styles.
As one critic points out in Don't Shoot Darling!,a recent book of essays
about new women directors in Australia: "The films of the Seventies
constitute 'difference' because of their challenge to prevailing ideologies
and their form of political address. The Eighties films have been more con­cerned
with challenging the audience relationship to film and traditional genres and
language."

Even in the larger,
untidy undertow of commercial Aussie cinema today – those films with no
special eye on festival prizes or art-house status – there's been a change in
the zeitgeist since the Seven­ties. The period pieces, folksy comedies and
coming-of-age movies that loomed large in that decade, have largely van­ished.
In the late Eighties, the average production slate for a year is dominated by
thrillers: crime thrillers, political thrill­ers, sci-fi or fantasy
thrillers.

The plots for many of
these movies sound like inspired postmodernist
brainstorms
(even if their execution is more platitudinous). In Haydn Keenan's
Pan­demonium (1988), a young woman try­ing to leave her husband is
subjected to a baroquely spiraling ordeal by psycho­logical terror and
kitchen weaponry. And in Ian Pringle's Prisoner of St. Peters­burg (1989),
an Australian boy roams a German town in the belief that he's a Dostoyevski character trapped in 19th century Russia.

Even in modern
nonfiction films, there is an impatience with the literal-minded languors of yesteryear and a hunger for corner-cutting
wit and feroc­ity. Many of these movies defy facile file-indexing under
"D for Documen­tary." Mark Lewis'
egregious
Cane Toads (1988) intersperses its educative factual account of the
ugly amphibians that invaded Northeast Australia with spoof dramatizations
(like one mock-Psycho scene of a toad menacing a shower). Like Celia,Cane Toads satirizes the
puffed-up anti-Commie twaddle that passed for documentaries shown to school
kids and so stars Australia's joke on itself: why invade someplace where the
only thing to do is go mad. And Bill Bennett's electrifying docudrama Mal­practice
(1989), about a botched deliv­ery in a hospital maternity ward, so
powerfully blurs the line between fact and fiction that we hardly know who's
an actor and who isn't, or where the script stops and the improvisation
begins. Instead, the viewer, trained by an increasingly lithe Australian
cinema, leaps happily across ellipses and sha­dowlines:
invited to seek and chase the truth rather than to let it wash sooth­ingly
over him at 24 gorgeous frames per second.

By ceasing to make
films about com­ing of age, Australian cinema has come of age. By shunning
the invitation to look back, it is at last looking forward. Farewell,
Eurydice. Welcome, Orpheus. And cheers, mate.